Coffee Daze

Comment

Comment by Jeannine Hunter Lazzaro on April 8, 2012 at 12:49pm

Thanks so much.  It is encouraging to hear someone speaking so truely to my core. I struggle regularly w/ many of the issues you have brought up. The narrative aspect of my work (societal excess, the disposability of our culture, wanton consumerism...) is constant but sometimes layered, unheralded within the painting process.  Your comment "I like the tension in the cool blue negative space between the cups" pretty much says it all. I have followed this theme in my work before and again. I have one painting in particular that focuses on this. However, I am reluctant to rely on the many abstract images that exist around us created by aarrangements of quotidian objects...seems too simple. I tend to bounce back and forth between realism and abstraction, that's me and I have fought desperately to be able to do that.

 

Once again thank you for your comments.   

Comment by Resident Curator on March 31, 2012 at 8:54pm

Curator’s Comment:  

 

Coffee Daze invites all of the monumentality of large expansive forms into small, ordinary subjects.  The wonderful scumbled paint surface vibrates with intensity, and edgy textural bits of color.  I like the tension in the cool blue negative space between the cups.  The concentration of warmer color in the four outermost quadrants keeps the piece balanced in a dynamic manner due to the varied cropping of the cups.  The viewer can’t quite gain a familiar perspective because of the stacking and zoomed in view.  For me this creates an inscrutable, if not enigmatic abstraction.  That this painterly tension can be cajoled from simple still life especially interests me, as also evidenced in your piece entitled Fast Food.  While I see similar strength in your much more abstract (non-objective) works, the energy wrought from ubiquitous items is especially worthy of comment.  While an underlying narrative may be about disposability and societal excess, these chosen objects seem to function as ideal, impassive vehicles ripe for your infusion of gestural marking.